Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone (11 page)

“A blonde. Well, that's something, isn't it? Did she see the video, the boy's mother?”

“Yes, of course,” Palma replied. “But she didn't recognize anyone she knew.”

Cerchia made a face: “That idiot wouldn't recognize herself in a mirror. What about the old bastard, what did he say?”

“If you're referring to the boy's grandfather, the signora said that she'd tell him this morning.”

“Sure, of course,” Cerchia muttered bitterly to himself, “she handles him with kid gloves. But she doesn't think twice about calling me up in the middle of the night and almost getting me killed on a rainy highway. Typical.” Then he turned to speak to Palma again: “I have a place here, near where they live. I took it so Dodo could stay with me when I see him every other week. I'll give you the address and my phone number, so you can get in touch with me whenever you need to. I'm going to go see her now; we need to try to figure out just what happened. I'm going to find him, my son. I'll find him.”

Lojacono spoke up: “Cerchia, if I could offer a little advice, not as a cop but as a father: Right now you're all in the same boat—your ex-wife, your ex-father-in-law, and everyone else who cares about the child. If you don't want to make our job even harder, don't put Signora Borrelli on the defensive; do your best to cooperate with her, and with us. If the boy has been kidnapped, and like the commissario told you, we still can't be sure of that, the first few times the kidnappers make contact will be crucial to the investigation. So please: help us help you.”

Cerchia listened in silence. Then he nodded: “Yes, right now the only thing that matters is that Dodo come home safe and sound. We can discuss the rest afterward.”

Palma reiterated the point: “Can you promise me, Dottor Cerchia, that you'll keep calm and let us know about anything new that comes up? We've asked your ex-wife to do the same. Lieutenant Lojacono put it very well: This is no time for grudges, we're all in the same boat.”

Cerchia stood up from his chair: “Thank you, Commissario, but no, we're not all in the same boat. I'm his father. His father. And when something happens to a son, believe me, the father is all alone in the boat of pain. Have a good day.”

And he left.

G
iorgio Pisanelli was leaning against a pillar at a street corner, a newspaper in hand. He was trying to keep the need to urinate under control.

He'd gone to the bathroom immediately before leaving the office, hoping that would win him at least an hour or so of peace, but nature had decided otherwise.

He'd become a fatalist, Pisanelli, but only as far as nature was concerned. Against the rest of the world he was used to fighting, and indeed he was still fighting, in his silent, gentlemanly way, refusing to resign himself. It was possible to fight against practically everything—cruelty, stupidity, ignorance—and sometimes it was even possible to win; but when it came to nature, there really wasn't much one could do.

Nature had decided to give him prostate cancer.

Who knows for how long nature had been laying the groundwork. It had conspired for years, in the shadows, perhaps since the long-ago day on which some great-great-grandfather had met a great-great-grandmother, to ensure that he'd get to enjoy that stabbing need to pee, even right after he'd gone to the bathroom. A ticking time bomb embedded in his genes that would go off decades, perhaps even centuries, later, with absolute precision. How can anyone fight against that?

Palma had told them all to break ranks and go home; after all, without a phone call from the alleged kidnappers, there wasn't much for them to do. And perhaps, eventually, as they kept telling each other, it was still possible that some aunt would materialize and say to the mother: What on earth, had you forgotten? We'd agreed that we were taking Dodo with us to Disneyland Paris for the weekend. We agreed, the other night at the club, while you were on your fourth cocktail.

In any case, aside from digging deeper into the Borrelli family, there wasn't anything else for Pisanelli to do. So he'd asked for permission to leave the office and, after his third bathroom break in two hours, he'd gone out. After all, his colleagues, too, had things to take care of: Lojacono and Di Nardo had gone to pay a call on the forensic squad about their burglary, Romano and Aragona were going first to the school, and then to see the little boy's mother at home.

Pretending to read his newspaper without taking his eyes off the door across the way, he thought back with a stab of pain to Dodo, and the way he'd looked up at the video camera just before vanishing. He'd reminded Pisanelli of his son Lorenzo as a kid: the same seriousness, the same deep clarity in the dark eyes. How long had it been since they'd spoken? A week, more or less. He should call him. Carmen would have been angry if she'd known that he'd let so much time pass between one phone call and the next.

He looked around for a shadowy corner where he could pee without being seen: after all, it would just be a couple of drops at the most. Like always. Sure, he could go into a café, pay for an espresso he'd barely touch, and ask to use the restroom; but what if she came out at that exact moment? He didn't want to run that risk.

Carmen was Pisanelli's wife. She was sweet, kind, and beautiful. He'd met her twenty years ago, a lifetime really, and he'd fallen in love with her while politely shaking her hand, saying hello after a mutual acquaintance had hastily introduced them. He'd fallen in love when she'd given him a level look with those dark eyes of hers, tilting her head to one side; it's what she did whenever her curiosity was aroused. He'd fallen in love when he heard her voice, as deep and broad as a chord played on a pipe organ. He'd fallen in love. And since falling in love he'd never stopped talking to her; he still talked to her constantly, and she answered back.

Even though she was dead.

Her time bomb had been set to go off almost three years before the one ticking away inside of him, and it had worked perfectly. Not that Giorgio had given up the fight, even then, but through tears he'd promised his wife that he wouldn't let her die engulfed by the agonizing torments the disease could bring, torments she was so afraid of. It hadn't occurred to him that it would be Carmen herself who would crumble before the prospect of that pain.

Leonardo, the monk who had become Pisanelli's best friend, said that it was something that happened; facing an abyss of suffering, human beings display either strength or weakness, and sometimes they choose to end things ahead of schedule. They choose to leapfrog past the evil that's consuming them, and go into the light before their time. That's what Leonardo would tell him, when they sat and reminisced about Carmen without sorrow: Giorgio because he still saw her every second of the day and in his dreams; the monk because he'd helped and comforted her, sustaining her faith to the very end. Giorgio and Leonardo had met at his wife's deathbed, and forged a bond of friendship that bound them still: the last gift that his wife had bestowed upon him before downing an entire bottle of painkillers and going to sleep forever.

Leonardo was right: Grief can cause so much fear that it robs you of your desire to go on breathing, even if you're surrounded by the love of a husband and a son. He himself would have put an end to Carmen's life, if her pain had become too much to handle. He'd been ready. But she'd beat him to it.

He noticed some movement in the atrium of the building and perked up; but it was a false alarm—just the butcher's boy talking to the doorman.

That was exactly why he was here right now, because he knew how tempting it could be to try to escape when confronted with pain. And he, Giorgio Pisanelli, deputy captain of the state police, fought every day against the temptation to wipe himself from the face of the earth instead of waiting around for the date prescribed by Nefarious Nature. But he couldn't. Not yet. First there was a case to close. First he had a killer to track down.

In the aftermath of Carmen's death, when he'd been left alone in a huge apartment still echoing with her voice, still filled with her scent, when he had turned down Lorenzo's suggestion that he go into retirement and join him up north, he'd asked himself: How does a person decide to kill himself? Where does one find the strength?

He knew the precinct he worked in like the back of his own hands. He'd been born there and he'd lived there all his life, like his parents and his grandparents before him. He knew all the abnormal norms, the usual oddities that characterized it: nothing could surprise him, because he knew how the neighborhood breathed as if it were a beloved, familiar animal, an immense beast that occasionally woke up, but for the most part lay sleeping, now and then shaken by unconscious spasms. And that's how he knew that those suicides were something different.

He'd discovered them one sleepy morning, before that drug-dealing ugliness his four idiot colleagues had gotten tangled up in, four colleagues he still couldn't help but think of with a hint of fondness. With Carmen and her death, still fresh at the time, weighing on his heart and mind, he'd started rummaging through the files and had noticed that over the past ten years, there'd been too many of these cases in the neighborhood. They'd all been handled professionally, no question, each subjected to a careful investigation and properly archived. Suicide notes, different means of death, motives, always good ones, underlying the deed: all within the norm.

And yet he'd never had a moment's doubt. Those weren't suicides.

He'd tried to explain it to the commissario, an old functionary, pragmatic and hardened, tested by years of police-work and largely indifferent to wild theories, what with all the work that there was to do. Then, on top of everything else, there'd been the scandal of the Bastards, and so of course the last thing anyone wanted to pay attention to were the fantasies of an old man. Even his new boss, Palma, who really did strike him as a good guy, didn't seem to give his ideas a lot of credence, though out of respect and courtesy, he left him free to investigate whatever he liked. But he was certain, absolutely certain, that those people had been murdered. And he was certain precisely because of Carmen.

Here's how he saw it: in order to want to die you have to be afraid. Depression, the slow falling back into the arms of a life that is no longer life, loneliness, poverty, a tiny pension, none of these things can easily become motives for suicide. To be so afraid that you're willing to die, you need courage. Immense courage.

When Giorgio had confided in Leonardo, he'd seen infinite pity in the monk's clear, light-blue eyes. He'd told him that unfortunately that wasn't how it was, that in fact loneliness was life's chief enemy, that many poor souls choose to end their lives because they can no longer tolerate the silence that surrounds them. That the years go by fast, too fast, but that days spent alone never seem to pass, and can cause intolerable anguish. Leonardo would tell him that he hoped that God, in his infinite so on and so forth, would forgive those benighted souls and so on and so forth, and that He'd welcome them into paradise, etc. But Giorgio was quite certain that someone else's hand had done more than a little to help usher them into the Almighty's presence.

And so he'd started putting the pieces of the puzzle together, with the scrupulous attention to detail that he'd developed over the course of a long career as a cop, collecting statements, eyewitness accounts, stories of shops forced into bankruptcy by the recession, accidental glances, apparently insignificant details. He'd wallpapered his apartment with newspaper clippings, letters, photocopies of scrawled notes, photographs of corpses. And he'd done the same in the office, attracting pity and sarcasm. He'd dug deep, disassembled and reassembled, with stubborn precision. He knew that his colleagues assumed he was losing his marbles, but that was fine by him: At least they left him alone. Aside from Aragona, of course.

His young colleague was the very picture of a bad cop, oafish and egotistical, arrogant and politically incorrect: And yet Giorgio found that it was precisely Aragona, with his obsession with nicknames and TV series, of whom he was fondest. Under his fake tan and those intolerable aviators, he sensed a kind of crude talent, an ungoverned intelligence that could turn him into a first-rate investigator—provided he gave up on trying to look like Serpico.

There she was. She came out of the front door and stopped, squinting into the sun. God, she looked like an elderly woman, but records indicated she was less than sixty. Dirty hair, shapeless sweater, shabby purse. The doorman gave her a brisk glance and didn't bother to say hello. She headed off toward the piazza, dragging her feet.

This was a new development in Pisanelli's investigation. After years spent working on the dead, reconstructing their misguided lives, their chain of misfortunes and, in the end, their incongruous demises, he had decided to break with procedure and identify potential future victims. In the last few months, he'd devoted himself to mapping out the locations of the suicides, in search of some common thread that might link them; in other words, he'd tried to narrow the field. Then he'd gone over the local pharmacies with a fine-toothed comb to find out who was taking psychotropic drugs, and who had recently increased his or her dose. It was hardly an orthodox method, sure, but it was still a method.

And eventually his research had brought him to her, Maria Musella, fifty-eight years old, who lived, barely, off a pitiful surviving spouse's pension, in a tiny apartment she'd inherited from her husband, who'd died ten years earlier. Maria Musella, who begged her doctor to prescribe her something that would help her sleep. Maria Musella, who didn't have a friend, who never went to play bingo, who tried to save money by buying her groceries twice a week from the local market. Today was market day, and Pisanelli was waiting for her to go out so he could get a glimpse of her up close. Maria Musella, who was traveling into a solitary old age filled with nothing and no one.